Still Gotta Come Through Chicago

Bears Season is Over; Bulls Draft Wednesday

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Can’t believe I cannot even use this unbelievable picture as the preview for this week’s newsletter.

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The bottom line is that this season is over. The Bears, depending on Mitch Trubisky’s status don’t even have a quarterback to play the week after next. Did you see Tyler Bray try to sling it around at the end of the game?

At this point, I’d rather have Tim Tebow run the triple option next Sunday than watch Tyler Bray try to operate an offense behind that O-Line.

Yeah, yeah, the conventional wisdom says the Bears should want to lose out and hope to get a quarterback in the draft. I understand the math. I understand the logic.

But for Bears fans, that’s never been our thing. We live and die over every win or loss. I can’t root for the Bears to lose, no matter how disgusting the product looks. That’s a nasty curse bestowed upon all of us, and it leads us to an inconvenient truth in Chicago sports right now.

The Cubs are reportedly looking to make major changes this offseason. At the very least, that means a soft rebuild. The era of competing for championships there is over.

The Blackhawks are a mess and have no discernible path forward. That championship era is long gone.

The White Sox have a bright future but decided it was a little much to be in the lead in Chicago, so decided to throw in a 76-year-old with two DUIs into the mix.

The Bears have sent their picks across the league and have invested every penny on the roster that’s on the field now. There needs to be a coaching change, but what does that really mean?

Hope in the NFL — and especially as a Bears fan — is fleeting. It’s sad that 2018 is one of my favorite football years ever. I mean, the Bears lost in the first round. But that hope felt so god damn good.

That entire following offseason felt good. Reading about what small, largely irrelevant moves the Bears were making to fill out their depth chart felt so important. On this very newsletter, which at the time had about 30 subscribers, I’d count down the days to the 2019 season every week.

That feels so long ago. Admitting defeat in the NFL is harder than in it is in almost any sport. Those years at the bottom wear on you. The only thing that gets you through them is that hope that one day you’ll be back in the playoffs, back in Soldier Field with your pals, signing Bear Down.

Being on the brink of falling back into the pit is the worst place to be. And it’s where we are right now. We need a new quarterback. We need a new coach. We’re going to need a new GM, too.

All the players we’ve learned to love during these last few years will either be traded and succeed elsewhere or stick around long enough to become old, expensive, and useless.

Matt Nagy has gone from a hero to a villain. When he went to a Bulls game at the United Center after the 2018 season, him and his kids got a standing ovation.

Today, he’s probably happy that he can don a mask around the city.

At one point, I though the man was legitimately different — a non-social misfit Marc Trestman behind the offense.

The Bears defense was there like it always had been, but we’d finally have an offense.

It burns, bad, to know that hope is all gone now.

We got one year to feel like we had the Packers number. The Bears in 2018 felt like the Cubs in 2015, but they skipped the championship and went straight to getting swept by the Marlins.

I should’ve seen this coming. The Bulls got rid of GarPax? They hired Billy Donovan? It was too good to be true!

It was all true, but of course, it meant everything else would fall apart around it.

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Troy Aikman was physically sick watching the Bears a few weeks ago. This week, Steve Levy couldn’t stop laughing at us.

“Chicago, as advertised.”

I’ll refrain from going off on a monologue about how Levy’s comments, despite being true, made me want to reach through my television screen and smack him. I’ll also refrain from knocking myself off the path this newsletter needs to go, and so I’ll just say now that any announcer that says Khalil Mack shouldn’t have gotten a holding call — ever — is a moron, and should know that if Mack got 10 holding calls in a row for no reason it still wouldn’t make up for how many holds the referees have missed against him throughout this year.

(Lastly, I don’t have time for good energy, but want to shoutout one of the best Bears defensive players ever — yeah, you heard that right — Akiem Hicks. Look what happened to the Bears when he went down last season, and look what happened when he went down Monday.)

Yes, I’m deflecting. The bottom line is that the nation is throwing up and laughing at us. They’re finally learning what it feels like to be a Bears fan week in, week out.

I wrote this just over three weeks ago, and even though this prediction did come to a fruition, it wasn’t even a good call.

The Bears play two of the better teams in football the next two weeks in the Saints and the Titans. If something major doesn’t change, this team could be .500 in a heartbeat.

In fact, it’s embarrassing I even inserted the caveat, “If something major doesn’t change…”

What was this organization going to change? Why would we expect them to be innovative or competent enough to make any sort of adjustment mid-season when the coaching staff can’t even make adjustments in-game?

The Bears are averaging just about a half a point in the third quarter through ten games. In other words, while the opposing coaching staff goes to work in the locker room, Nagy stares at his play sheet and picks his nose while our running backs and quarterback inject cortisol into their shoulders and knees and snot-rocket blood out of their noses.

Take out Cordarrelle Patterson’s kick return, and the Bears have now been outscored 62-7 in third quarters. Every week I get my computer out and point to a singular reason why there needs to be a regime change.

There’s been many: the lack of attention to detail, the tendency to give up, the offensive output — generally. Everything leads back to Nagy.

Sure, Ryan Pace looks bad. He assembled this offensive line, he hired Nagy and he drafted Mitch Trubisky. But at least he picked the defense too, and has done some good in the drafts.

What has Matt Nagy done? He’s said BOOM after the defense won games and said the offense needed to get better. It’s never has.

The refs missed two roughing the passer calls tonight that could have changed the game, and the Bears still had a chance to win. We fumbled a punt on our own 25 and held the Vikings to three. In the end, out offense is so impossibly bad that we lost a game by 6 and yet never had a chance.

Nagy handed over the play calling this week, and things looked better for a bit. But that was just an attempt to save his own ass. My target is still squarely on his backside. He’s put this team in a position to fail and they’ve still won games in spite of him. Can you think of a single game the Bears have won because of him?

The Arizona Cardinals average 425 yards per game. The New York Jets average 266. The Minnesota Vikings have allowed 413 yards per game.

The Bears gained 149 Monday.

It sucks that Nick Foles had to tarnish his legacy as a Super Bowl winning quarterback by coming to Chicago to have Bears fans throw stones at him for a problem that is not his. Now, it’s likely his career is almost over, depending on how bad that injury was.

Foles, being carted out with 40 seconds left and tears streaming down his cheeks, is all of us.

And yes, it sucks that Trubisky had to be drafted — through no fault of his own — second overall to a team that had nothing in place to assist him.

Taking sacks out of the equation, Foles has about 2.5 seconds to throw on average, only more than four quarterbacks in the league. It feels like a lot less than that.

You can tell his internal clock tells him to check down even when it’s not necessary because of how bad the offensive line is.

Ryan Pace got Foles but decided that he’d leave the offensive line alone and pray for the best. Now, Foles is in a hospital bed praying for the best because of it.

And Nagy and co. have done nothing to help that issue either. The Bears do nothing to offset their line struggles. There’s no backs over the middle of the field. The most creative the Bears get is a screen pass to the right side instead of the left. Everything is sideline-to-sideline. None of it works.

The Bears were using Demetrius Harris earlier in the year when they have Cole Kmet and Jimmy Graham.

They brought in Lamar Miller today and he looked great. So what’d they do? Made sure to give the ball to Ryan Nall.

The immediate impact that switching the play caller made was enabling the Bears to run a quick play after a questionable completion. That was a first, ten weeks into the season.

But something already this broken can’t be fixed. Third down and 5? How about a negative-four yard lateral out on the sideline to Allen Robinson? This coaching staff never gives their players a chance — not the quarterback, not the receivers, and definitely not the defense.

It’s hard to imagine that some of the Bears top-tier talent would want to play here after this year.

It’s also hard to imagine the Bears ever having a dynamic quarterback. Like, ever. Every weekend I sit down and watch football for nine straight hours on Sunday and think about what it would be like to have an Aaron Rodgers, Kyler Murray or Tua on our team. I literally cannot fathom it, though.

I cannot imagine Mahomes or Watson in a Bears uniform, no matter how many photoshops I see on Twitter, because my mind won’t allow me to believe that it would work.

The fact that the Cubs didn’t win a World Series for 108 years still feels almost underrated. It’s such an insane stat that it’s hard to wrap your head around.

But the Bears are really starting to get to that level. The Bears haven’t had a great quarterback in the Super Bowl era. Think about how much talent there is, and think about how hard it would be to even purposely miss out on all of it.

Look around on Sunday and tell me how it’s possible the Bears have not found a viable option at the position.

It’s insane.

I don’t know what else to say, really. Matt Nagy should be fired, Matt Nagy should be fired pt.2, and Matt Nagy should be fired pt.3 said it all. Nothing really changed Monday.

But for some reason, it does feel worse today. The Bears are the pride of the city, but also the laughing stock of the entire football-watching country.

The Bears are on a bye next week. Perhaps that’s an opportunity for me to pick up another hobby so I don’t have to subject myself to this six more times this year.

But who am I kidding, I’ll sit down with my dumb little notepad and write “what was that play call?” ten more times two weeks from now, with my dumb little pizza, with my dumb little hangover, and go to sleep sad and fat once again.

It got dark at 4 p.m. Monday. And it’ll keep getting darker, along with the Bears season, until the winter finally turns. Brace yourselves.

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The road to seven championships, led by Arturas Karnisovas, begins Wednesday. That’s why I called him AK 4-7, folks.

The Bulls, who are somehow my only hope heading into a winter, have the fourth overall pick in Wednesday’s NBA Draft.

One of God’s cruelest tricks was putting the Bulls front and center in Chicago as everything else crumbles, and then having the no. 1 prospect in the upcoming be fucking LaMelo Ball.

Yes, the guy you’ve seen on your television screens and Twitter feeds for no reason over the last six years cherry picking and shooting 35-foot jumpers and 25-foot floaters, is the consensus best player in this year’s draft.

DEEEEEEEP BREATH.

The Bulls, because they finally have a competent front office, have basically let no one know their intentions headed into Wednesday.

A way-too-brief overview of this year’s draft: It’s one of the weakest drafts in memory at the top. There is no Zion Williamson or Ja Morant here. But it’s also one of the deepest drafts. In other words, it’s likely more than one team picking towards the end of the lottery will end up with a better player than a team in the top-5.

Here’s a few thoughts on what I think the Bulls should do Wednesday to best set themselves up for the future:

• Against my better judgement, I am OKAY with the Bulls either 1. trading up or 2. standing pat if he falls and drafting LaMelo Ball. He’s a great passer and rebounder when he wants to be. He has absolutely zero discipline, a certifiably insane father, and has never been told ‘No’, but he does have a 6’8 frame and a handle. His ceiling is an all-star and his floor is making Billy Donovan go bald and his father making my life a living hell for the next few years. But he is, by all accounts, the most surefire pick.

  I am only okay with this pick on one condition, however. That’s if the Bulls trade Zach LaVine. There is no reason to have two players on the team who care not one bit about the players around them. LaMelo could* be a good defender, but that’s also what we’ve been hearing about LaVine for the last three years. I have no interest in watching Coby White, LaVine, and LaMelo chuck up threes and fail to get back on defense this year. If the Bulls can get a good, veteran point guard, which I think they will, and get rid of LaVine, I’ll deal with LaMelo. You guys happy? There ya go.

  I hope he goes first overall and the Bulls don’t have a chance to get him, but I wanted to be on record.

• The Bulls don’t have any “needs” because all they have is needs. The most hilarious thing is when Bulls fans check out our roster and see where we could maybe fill a hole in the draft. Ladies and gentlemen, the Bulls fucking stink. We are not in a position to pick and choose. We need good players, not a center or a point guard or a shooting guard.

• I’m not going to pretend to be a draft expert, but I do know a great deal. And from what I’ve seen, frenchman Killian Hayes is the best fit for the Bulls. I say “fit” here not because he fills a “need,” but because he has a high ceiling as a playmaker, will most likely be available at pick no. 4, and will need plenty of time to develop. The Bulls, if anything, have plenty of time. When I look at “needs,” I think about what an NBA team needs in general. The Bulls have players that can score, but don’t have any playmakers. LaVine can score, but he is not a playmaker. A playmaker is someone who can create shots for themselves, but also for others. That’s what Killian Hayes can be, if coached correctly. A year ago, he wouldn’t be worth the pick. But now, with a good front office in place and Billy Donovan at the helm, I trust the Bulls can turn this 6’5, lefty point guard into a guy that can run an effective pick and roll and make players better around him for years to come.

• But I wouldn’t be devastated if the Bulls went another route. Though headed in a promising direction — the Bulls are at the bottom of the league still. If they traded the pick and moved down because they didn’t love anyone at the top, I’d be fine with it. What I really want to happen, as I just said, is for the Bulls to part ways with LaVine. He’s not a no.1 but thinks he is, which will always make him a net-negative in my mind. You can’t build a championship team around LaVine, but he’d refuse to consider himself as anything but a no.1, or even a no. 2. Get rid of LaVine, get something back from him, and start over with the young nucleus we have.

• There are more teams trying to win a championship — or at least trying to make the playoffs — next year than there have been in a long time. If I’m the Bulls, I’m taking advantage of that. Get rid of the muck and start over. The only player I care about keeping is Wendell Carter Jr., who I believe will be a stud when it’s all said and done. I like Lauri Markkanen, who just had his second kid at 23 and doesn’t really seem to care much about getting better or winning (wait, maybe I don’t), but I wouldn’t cry if we lost him. It’s probably smart to keep him and see how he develops under a legitimate staff. Carter Jr. is all I care about. Coby White looks to be a keeper, but if someone wants him and the return is worth it, I’d say have at it. His ceiling is a streaky scorer, which every team needs, but you can find them anywhere. Keep WCJ. Keep Lauri, sure. Maybe keep Coby. Everyone else, evaluate them hard, and don’t hesitate to pack their bags if the right team comes calling.

• The NBA season starts December 22nd. I want a new, fresh look on the floor at the UC when it does. We, the Chicago sports fans, deserve something better. Here’s to hoping we get it.

Did I just trick myself into excitement? LET’s GO!